Focusing on the transnational circulation of ideas about suffrage and education, this article explores the work of suffragist Muriel Matters (1877-1969), and teacher educator Lillian de Lissa (1885-1967). It begins with Matters' and de Lissa's childhoods and education in post-suffrage Australia, and their initial work as an actress and…

Although international definitions of early childhood repeatedly refer to a birth-8 age span, there are complex, institutional divides within this age range. This paper explores the divide between pre-compulsory and compulsory early childhood institutions. In countries such as Finland this divide is not such an issue because children do not begin…

While there is a wealth of feminist research on women's educational leadership and policy-making in the interwar years, this article extends the discussion into the Second World War. My focus is the educational leadership of Dorothy Walker, head teacher of St Peter's Infant School and the youngest head teacher in Birmingham, and Lillian de Lissa,…

Focusing on British graduates from Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC) in London, this article illustrates transnational history's concerns with the reciprocal flows of people and ideas within and beyond the British Empire. GHTC's progressive curriculum and culture positioned women teachers as agents of change, and the article highlights the lives…

This article explores teacher educator Lillian de Lissa's working life in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1944 the McNair report criticised residential colleges and their female staff as isolated and intellectually impoverished. However, in Australia and then as the foundation Principal of Gipsy Hill Training College, de Lissa was not…

British teacher education in the interwar years was a contested field, dominated numerically by women but regulated by the Board of Education. The traditional perception of women's residential training colleges was that they were autocratic and socially isolated. By focusing on Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC), the first specialist training…

This article uses a historical lens to illuminate literacy teaching as it is constructed in two recent reports, "Teaching Reading" and "In Teachers' Hands". In surveying these texts alongside 19th-century sources, we show that an autonomous view of literacy has always held sway, along with a primary focus on reading. Parents'…